You're hard to convince (if possible at all). Reminds me of the story of MS and bug reports:

I'm grateful that you're offering to help, but I don't have the time to spend on a careful examinaton - which is precisely why I wanted opinions from people who'd been through hell on linux and had also used debian a lot.

It's like I'm asking for a review, and you're offering to help me configure a system so I can check for myself - it's very generous of your, but if I had time for that, I wouldn't be asking for a review!

It took 6 hours just to install the basic set of packages for the RH server I just setup (mostly time spent choosing and checking version incompatibilities, checking for regression bugs we can't live with, etc). You seem to think I could go through a package list in 5 minutes; generally it takes me considerably longer than that simply to read all the names and recall to mind what I know of each one.

PS Given how badly RH-10 is going I'm now trying a debian install in parallel on the server; if RH-10 isn't going to work without hacking the packages or config, then there's no point in it - that will still prevent us from recompiling the kernel. The theory was that RH-10 at least had to be better than 8 and 9, but this doesn't appear to be the case; so, I had believed that RH-10 would be less likely than debian to waste days by catastrophically not working with something (given the unknown quality of how many of our critical apps are available as debs)

If there are any problems with the server in the next few weeks we'll probably have to reformat and install something else (I wish we could put windows on it the rate things are going here, but amongst other things I need it as a peer in the build-farm, which means it must run unix). But I need at least the server working *today* .

The server has less in the way of exotic hardware than my workstation, but more in the way of exotic apps (lots of different tools from all over the place). AFAICS the workstation will probably still need to be RH-10 (assuming it installs OK on *that* machine!)

You're hard to convince (if possible at all). Reminds me of the story of MS and bug reports:

Yes, sorry. It's a habit; I think it may even be a survival trait of being a systems architect: I get people coming to me all the time with "lets add this in", or "we need to change this so that it works like that instead" etc - and I have to be the person insisting that changes are only made for the best of reasons (e.g. any fundamental architectural changes during dev need to be avoiding some fatal flaw or similar sev-1 problem, since they have a huge knock-on cost as the update gets propagated throughout the source code).

It has the positive benefit that once I've been convinced of something it's almost guaranteed to be correct (because I've done so much cross-checking by that point, and explored all the possible errors) - and that the person doing the persuading normally ends up knowing more about what they were proposing than when they started. I appreciate it can be a frustrating process that no-one can be bothered with , but when very busy you tend to slip into old habits, don't you?

initial reactions to debian: - tried the net-installer suggested by the official docs. Was extremely encouraged (sarcasm) to see that there are only "unofficial" versions of this and that some of them are broken links (from the hopmepage of debian.org!). Inspired me with confidence - net-installer crashes lots of times when installing packages; seems author was too lazy to implement a "retry package X yes/no?" (just a guess, but it looks like it was caused by network timeouts, or a busy mirror server). - instller gives me great hope: when it crashes on a package, it shows you a list of install stages and lets you go back as many or as few as you want! (what RH obviously needed 5 years ago but they were incapable of doing for some reason) - even more exciting, when you select the "install pacakges" again, it doesn't download any pacakges it had already installed! - However, at this point you start to wonder if the coder knew much about programming: they clearly have used an O(N) algorithm for checking packages, a process which surely is O(1); yuou sit there watching it get slower, and slwoer, and slower for no obvious reason. - Eventually packages install OK, and I Choose a Kernel (2.6) - And now it crashes trying to install PCMCIA (Oh for gods sake - it's PAINFULLY obvious I don't have PCMCIA cards - this is a tower server!).

At which point debian becomes a bit of a waste of time. The PCMCIA crash goes back to the "where shal I retry from" again, but now it has: - wiped ALL settings for the disk paritioning - corrupted / partially transformed the installed packages, so that if you try and restart from there, it crashes every time - gives you no effective option but to start by repartitioning; this means a 99% from-scratch restart. because of some stupid failure trying to install something that is obvivously useless

So. With another 2 hours wasted (thanks, Debian!) I'm giving it another go - perhaps a 2.4 kernel will not be so frickin stupid as to crash like that? Who knows? At any rate, it's not impressive: just like RH, it has an installer with lots of gimmicks but equally many show-stopper bugs so that you wish whichever fool did the gimmicks had spent their time making the core parts *actually work* instead .

You could blame me for following the advice on the website; obviously I shouldn't have been so trusting and stupid as to expect something I was encouraged to do would actually work <sarcasm>. If it doesn't work, howabout NOT putting it on front of your website, hmm? (rhetorical question ).

Here are some pointers. I especially advise you to learn how the APT system works (because you are used to RPM).

More confidence-inspiring stuff; apparently, according to the APT people, every invention in UI and HCI of the last 20 years was a mistake, and we should only be using CLI's. Not even text-based menus are to be spared:

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dselect is a program that helps users select Debian packages for installation. It's considered somewhat complicated and rather boring, but with practice you can get the hang of its console-based ncurses interface.

Obviously, this isn't necessarily written by the APT autors/maintainers - but it IS the official HOWTO, which of course is (being linux) effectively the main manual. If the developers disagree, presumably they would have made it clear by now.

So, the CLI version of apt, with almost as many options as RPM, but with ordinary users expected to understand and use a much greater percentage of them, is apparently without any kind of sensible UI? Great. Presumably anyone who can't memorize all the options doesn't deserve to use such great software?

EDIT: seems there *ARE* good UI tools for this, they just aren't mentioned in the howto. The installer eventually found it's way into "aptitude" which seems very good so far.

- And now it crashes trying to install PCMCIA (Oh for gods sake - it's PAINFULLY obvious I don't have PCMCIA cards - this is a tower server!).

At which point debian becomes a bit of a waste of time. The PCMCIA crash goes back to the "where shal I retry from" again, but now it has: - wiped ALL settings for the disk paritioning - corrupted / partially transformed the installed packages, so that if you try and restart from there, it crashes every time - gives you no effective option but to start by repartitioning; this means a 99% from-scratch restart. because of some stupid failure trying to install something that is obvivously useless

But, curiously, this time I don't get asked for a kernel, and it installs without problems. It's now doing the packages (took 1 hour to select a basic set of packages ) so I should soon now whether it's worked.

Can you point me to the installer you used? If you can choose a 2.6.-kernel it's probably the beta-installer of the next release or something else, but not the official installer. (There is no 2.6. kernel in stable.)

I recommend to download the first CD (ISO image) for the base installation. You can download the rest of the packages over the internet.

But, curiously, this time I don't get asked for a kernel, and it installs without problems. It's now doing the packages (took 1 hour to select a basic set of packages ) so I should soon now whether it's worked.

There's tasksel. That's an installation tool, which lets you choose packages very roughly. It comes up in the installation, before you can select individual packages I think. You can install more packages later. I advise you to get the base system running, before you fine-tune your package selection.

It will take another 3-4 hours to download just one ISO; I expect it's obvious why this is something most people don't want to do (especially when it's liable to include tons of rubbish they don't want - e.g. my total install was around 500Mb or less, before I'd started pruning packages; I certinaly don't need a 650Mb CD to do that).

As it is, Debian is going great guns: Aptitude is telling me that ethereal (absolutely vital tool for network development: it's one of the best packet-sniffers) is "uninstallable" and that I should file a bug report. It's useful to be able to run your packet sniffer(s) from multiple different machines, both to do two-ended protocol debugging, and just to debug more general network topology problems.

Even better, I can't seem to find an FTP client that is installable either, except for a TFTP. Again, I'm asked to file a bug report. This is such a load of ****, and exactly what I feared: that Debian would not be a usable distro, due to lots of core and critical software being unavailable. Unless I'm missing something, AFAICS there's no option but to wipe the CD-RW (good choice there) and forget Debian for another 5 years. I'm really not impressed.

I don't pretend that I'm being "easy" on Debian, but I'm a lot more knowledgeable about linux than most people (having used it as a desktop OS for years), and if *I* am having major difficulties with a distro, then it's plain ****. To put it into perspective, this is just as bad as the worst of the DOS and Windows installs over the last 10 years.

Can you point me to the installer you used? If you can choose a 2.6.-kernel it's probably the beta-installer of the next release or something else, but not the official installer. (There is no 2.6. kernel in stable.)

I chose the "medium" install option (lesson 1 for debian newbies: you have to learn an arbitrary naming scheme where everything has three versions: you have unstable, which [ * ] is stable; stable which is ... also stable; and testing, which I can never remember: is it more unstable than unstable or less? Confused? You will be...) whichever that was.

[ * ] = according to Debian users, and possibly the debian.org website too, but it's so hard to navigate I doubt I could find it again if it is stated there

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I recommend to download the first CD (ISO image) for the base installation. You can download the rest of the packages over the internet.

I've downloaded 5 ISO's in the last few days; there's only so much hogging of bandwidth you can do before you end up preventing everyone else from doing any work. At the moment it seems I don't have any options for a fully working linux, and I guess I'll just delete all this apt-rubbish, get a bastardised RPM on there, and hope that that server can last another 12 months or so without upgrading the kernel (which will of course become impossible the moment I start hacking APT out and RPM in).

Hopefully, by then, there will be some decent linux distro somewhere which both has an installer that *actually works* and also *lets you install new apps* - and even lets you *upgrade existing apps*. (RH fails on the first, debian on the second, and Mandrake on the third, IME).

FWLIW, the only linux distro I've ever had that "just worked" was one of the mini-linuxes for routers (and NOT using the tom's bootdisk - I could *never* get that crud to work); the project itself died, which was rather sad. It ran on the most exotic of hardware without complaint, and never screwed up. Wow. Like some kind of Holy Grail .

Adam, the reason why you run into so much trouble is that you didn't use the official installer and you didn't install Debian stable either. It's a mistake of Debian to link to this image, but as a first-time user you should really use the official installer. It's not nice, but certainly very stable and everything is installable.

As an FTP client you can use GFTP or any other. Every package in stable can be installed of course.

EDIT: FYI, composed before the previous post had appeared, henec it ignores it

It gets better. The debian installer has installed an FTPd that is permanently stuck in "anonymous-only" mode.

So, basically, inside a secure network with an expensive carefully-maintained firewall, I have a newly installed machine that: - won't allow you to install ftp - won't allow you to FTP into it and upload files

I can kind-of understand that it's in some way "good" to have your system "secure by default" but not when the system provider is unable to provide a working system, unable to provide documentation (e.g. none of the debian docs appear to cover the current preferred package installer!), and unable to make it obvious how to turn off all the "idiot" stuff.

Oh, and they do you the favour of installing a copy of VI that is EIGHT YEARS OLD! So, the standard text editor you expect to always have as your friend? Nah, on debian you have to use the version so old it doesn't have keybindings, doesn't have any statusline to tell you WTF is going on, etc. Insult to injury, as you attempt to go around and fix things.

In all, even if I can fix all these problems, I cannot recommend Debian to anyone, it's just too painful (and you get the constant impression of bashing your head against an extremely well-built brick-wall). This is in contrast to RH, where you get the impression you're tryuing to use a computer made on Blue Peter, held together with carboard and sticky-backed plastic. Save yourself the hassle - find a copy of RH-7/8 instead. Or even a Suse, if you can find one.

Right now, if it weren't for our unix-only tools, I would *definitely* reformat and install win2k or use NT4 (I kept a spare hard-drive with a minimal NT4 install just-in-case something like this happened; note: on boot, it's using a mere 23Mb of RAM! (which probably means I'd tweaked it when it was last in use). Whereas linux...). But all-in-all the experiment has worked well: the next time I have to make a strategic decision involving a choice of OS's, or making assumptions about what it will cost us to get different OS's working, I know not to assume that linux has got any better recently. That could easily save months of pain when it comes to choosing what to deploy on virgin desktops and servers.

Adam, the reason why you run into so much trouble is that you didn't use the official installer and you didn't install Debian stable either. It's a mistake of Debian to link to this image, but as a first-time user you should really use the official installer. It's not nice, but certainly very stable and everything is installable.

As an FTP client you can use GFTP or any other. Every package in stable can be installed of course.

Thanks. If this is true, then I think calling it "a mistake" to link to it is the understatement of the month . Especially seeing as this section is linked to from the front page directly, and they RECOMMEND you use the net-installer , and it's what most people probably want to use.

Re: stable: when you say "everything is installable" does that mean to the same recent-ish versions that are in [whatever it was I was using]?

Even there, they had a copy of MySQL that is *completley unusable* because of fatal bugs that are marked WONTFIX for that release. They also had a version of Mozilla that looked like it was sufficiently out-of-date to again be effectively unusable. This is distinctly worrying, when you've just been sitting in front of a screen that's telling you you can't install what you told it to, which was based on what it told you it needed. Am I to be stuck in a twilight world where I can never get recent versions of things?

EDIT: I think I'm losing the plot here, and probably forgetting questions that have already been answered; I've not had much sleep trying desperately to sort this out (I can't do any work until I've got it all fixed).

Actually the first link works for me. So the page is http://www.phy.olemiss.edu/debian-cd/? I don't recommend any of these images anyway, if you don't know exactly what you are doing. They are provided on a personal basis and unofficial as you noted yourself.

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I chose the "medium" install option

I followed all the links to the images, but none offers the medium install option. Can you give me a direct link?

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(lesson 1 for debian newbies: you have to learn an arbitrary naming scheme where everything has three versions: you have unstable, which [ * ] is stable; stable which is ... also stable; and testing, which I can never remember: is it more unstable than unstable or less? Confused? You will be...) whichever that was.

There ist Debian stable-testing-unstable in this order. A lot of people say, that unstable is "stable", because it has the release quality of other distros (but can occassionally break, therefore I don't recommend it to newbies).

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I've downloaded 5 ISO's in the last few days; there's only so much hogging of bandwidth you can do before you end up preventing everyone else from doing any work.

Downloading an ISO prevents you from doing work? You'll need most os the first ISO for a base install anyway. Of course there are quite a lot of possibilites to install Debian. Just look at the manual. But regarding, that you are a first-time user, why not using the simplest possibility or at least something official?

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At the moment it seems I don't have any options for a fully working linux, and I guess I'll just delete all this apt-rubbish, get a bastardised RPM on there, and hope that that server can last another 12 months or so without upgrading the kernel (which will of course become impossible the moment I start hacking APT out and RPM in).

Ouch!!

I still suggest you to download one (the first) ISO image of Debian 3.0, burn it on CD and install. If I remember correctly you have to type bf2.4 at the beginning to use the 2.4.18 kernel for installation (there is a help page). Furthermore I suggest you only to use the rough package selection (tasksel) and only install what you really need for a base system, so you don't "waste" too much time. You can install/uninstall packages later. You can also reconfigure every package after installation, so most of the time you can stick with the defaults. If it's possible for you, you should get a bit more familiar with Debian (especially APT), before you upgrade to testing or unstable.

EDIT: I think I'm losing the plot here, and probably forgetting questions that have already been answered; I've not had much sleep trying desperately to sort this out (I can't do any work until I've got it all fixed).

Maybe that's part of the problem. You try to do something quick and Debian really isn't suited for the quick (and dirty) approach. You need to understand some basic things, which needs some time, but saves you a lot of pain in the next years to come. Actually most of the problems you mentioned in the past months regarding Linux, aren't an issue on Debian.

You're right in saying, that a lot of stable packages are outdated. Keep in mind it was released in 2002 and it includes mostly packages, which were stable at this point of time. Nevertheless you should first install the base system properly (in a way, that you know what you are doing). After that these problems can be solved easily. You can look at pages like http://www.apt-get.org/ and http://www.backports.org/ for newer versions of packages for woody.

As it happens, I've read similar things before, when researching Debian. I think, prior to this, Endolf's comment sums up very accurately my own POV: this looks good, looks like it would do just what I want on a server; next time I'm doing a server install, I'll try it.

But I've in recent months been looking for some info on "good" packaging, as a reference to beat the JVM developers over the head (the current state of java packaging being a bi of a ****-up), and as a guide for projects I'm involved in that use custom dynamic packaging systems; I'm well aware that it is a difficult area of design, and this page seems a great resource for referencing some of the "based on painful past experience, here's some cunning and well-thought-out ways of designing your package system". Which is just the kind of experience package-designers today really need .

I can't help but find this thread terribly entertaining. Simply because I go through this exact same hell every time I convince myself that "Linux must have gotten better by now" and try to give it another chance. That happens about once every 2 years. My last SUSEe install went well.. it was just the fact that everything on it crashed all the time after that point and I couldn't get the software I wanted to run on it that irritated me.I do have a preview disk of the Java Desktop System.. it seemed to work when I tried it out... but I only played with it for an afternoon. Red Hat installers are looking prettier these days...

Disaster. RH 10 is so crap it can't even install two network cards and the loopback; I have a 127.0.0.1 that maps to NOTHING, and I have *no idea* how to get it back.

Also, ifup eth0 fails, but dhclient causes eth0 to correctly load from DHCP; the config options in sysconfig (for anyone familiar with RH...) are setup as per normal, specifying DHCP, but it's not doing it.

UPDATE: this is so pathetic it's almost enough to make you want to weep.

Some complete fscking moron @ Redhat fscked up the install process by assinging random cow-manure hardware addresses to the interfaces. I noticed the unexpected HW address in the ifcfg-eth0 before, but thought nothing of it (assumed it was part of an upgrade since I last used RH).

Removing the fscking line completely caused all networking to start working again, including the lo. What a piece of steaming manure

So, for poor souls equally foolish as I, to trust that RH no longer employed morons (I have plenty of stories about the mind-numbing stupidity of the coding of the network installer for RH 5.x through to 7.x), here is what you need to do after install:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

(movecursortolinethatlookslike: HWADDR: FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF)

press"d"twice (linedisappears)

type":wq" (enter)

Now just type

1

ifupeth0

to bring up your networking. NB: this is only suggested if your networking wasn't working in the first place (god only knows what bug causes this, and what scenarios do/do not trigger it!). The way to test is:

if you can "ping 127.0.0.1" and get a response, then don't bother with the above fix.

Oh, and I strongly request that no-one ever pay for an RH again; it's a very small yet significant way to pay them back for making software that (I suspect deliberately, to inflate their revenues, given that the old versions were MORE robust) doesn't work in the most common of situations.

I think right now I'm somewhere between "why did I do this to myself?" and "I'm losing the will to live" .

Should I feel guilty? Sorry, I really wanted to be helpful. I still think the main failures was to install from an unofficial image.

Unfortunately I don't live just some kilometres away from Adam so I could go over and give him some hints. I can offer to answer mails or maybe be available on ICQ for some time (so I can read his curses in real-time ). Debian is not as user friendly (yet) at the beginning like e.g. Suse, so you need to learn some basics to enjoy the benefits.

Well, I suppose Chris must be pleased you've found something else to fume at...

Seriously, I never have a problem with Linux. Other peole have terrible isses, but everything works first time for me - and that includes a WinTV/Radio card and an original 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics. I expect I ignore some things that don't work because I just assume that they're not implemented - but nothing's ever killed an install for me.

I've paid for Mandrake in the past, and bought a Debian distro at an expo just to show my support - never installed it - but the places around me that used to sell distros no longer do, so these days I upgrade via magazine cover disks.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a DVD being carried to a computer!

(Edit: I guess I never did get Quake2 running in OpenGL on a work machine's TNT2. But I still kicked ass in 320x200 SVGALib mode, so never really pursued it...)

I expect I ignore some things that don't work because I just assume that they're not implemented - but nothing's ever killed an install for me.

This is the source of much of the kernel misery - if you do this, you have a high probability of torpedoing your kernel, and putting yourself in a position where it is *practically impossible* to upgrade.

I know; I've done exactly what you said on lots of installs (who hasn't? Who ever gets a distro that installs properly? [debian stable aside])

You can't get away with it that long; e.g. one time it meant that eventually my soundsystem vanished and I couldn't get it back, another time ignoring such problems eventually ended ujp with the discovery that my compiler was ****ed, and so I couldn't install any source-based apps - and I couldn't ever fix the compiler, despite detailed bug hunting with the help of many experts .

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(Edit: I guess I never did get Quake2 running in OpenGL on a work machine's TNT2. But I still kicked ass in 320x200 SVGALib mode, so never really pursued it...)

See? Sooner or later something bites you. You may have been able to live with that Q2 problem; but what if it had been your IDE (this has happened to me on linux distros before too!)? Or what if your own game wouldn't work, so you couldn't do any dev on your workstation?

I don't by any means deny that many people get away with it OK, but the problems (or, if I were feeling honest, f***-ups) in linux, from the kernel all the way through to the distros, the installers, and often the apps themselves, are definitely there. The most serious ones seem not to be bugs so much as a mixture of poor coders (who just write really stupid code) and bad architectural decisions (e.g. how the linux kernel is compiled) [although there may have been sound practical reasons for choosing them that way initially - rather like the whole "no-one will need more than 640k" debacle on the PC: just because it saved the company money doesn't excuse the fact it was a bad design decision]

PS I'm not doing this thread to rant; I'm doing it to give a healthy warning to anyone considering linux, and providing a forum for people (like Jens) to throw out advice that is likely to prove valuable many times over as people here read it, digest, and later are able to avoid e.g. the debian net-install! Oh, and because it was an excuse for a witty topic title

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